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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/unqiueuser on 2024-02-06 06:50:54.
I work in claims and because we’re long term / personal injury claims we’re not considered a call centre, but we DO take calls from our claimants and need to be available to take calls from claimants, and on average I receive about 6-8 calls a day, but generally only 4 of those are for me.
Recently there has been a trend of some colleagues putting themselves on unavailable for long periods of time (3+ hours daily) to avoid calls and when you reach out to ask if they’re free for a call, they don’t respond until it’s been at least 5 minutes because in that time you’ve probably ended the call for them anyway.
I’d taken a call for a colleague named ‘Sally’ already (and in a department of 100+ colleagues, 2 calls for 1 person is unusual) when I received another call, but this time it was from an external complaints body wanting to ask Sally some questions which at that stage not YET a complaint.
At 2:32 I messaged Sally to ask if she’s free and while I wait I get the background from the nice external complaints person.
At 2:42 she replied and said ‘Sorry I was just on a call, everything okay?’ and I immediately replied saying ‘No, they’re still on the call and I can transfer you’.
Sally immediately backtracks and says ‘Sorry I’m still on the call, can you take a message?’
What Sally doesn’t know is that I can see her status and it’s set to ‘do not disturb’ and not ‘on a call’ so I know she’s just trying to get out of taking calls, but I just agreed and I decided instead of resolving the call, I WOULD take a message and pass it on.
As requested I took a message from the nice external complaints person as I wasn’t able to resolve the query I confirmed that I would escalate it urgently to Sally’s manager and our internal complaints team as they wanted to know about an urgent payment that hadn’t been processed in a week.
Sally immediately replied and said I should have said who it was and she’d have taken the call. That’s so odd, I thought she was on a call?
TL;DR Sally didn’t want to take a call that she could have resolved immediately and asked me to take a message, I helpfully took a message and sent it to her manager and our complaints team.
(Also before anyone asks either way the payment will be processed today so me taking the message didn’t screw anyone other than Sally over)